Regierungsbezirk Karlsruhe
A golden autumn glow on the castle of Heidelberg just before the sun set behind the hills.
(wikipedia) Heidelberg Castle is a ruin in Germany and landmark of Heidelberg. The castle ruins are among the most important Renaissance structures north of the Alps. The castle has only been partially rebuilt since its demolition in the 17C and 18C. It is located 80 metres (260 ft) up the northern part of the Königstuhl hillside, and thereby dominates the view of the old downtown. The earliest castle structure was built before 1214 and later expanded into two castles circa 1294; however, in 1537, a lightning-bolt destroyed the upper castle. The present structures had been expanded by 1650, before damage by later wars and fires. In 1764, another lightning-bolt caused a fire which destroyed some rebuilt sections.
THIS was the best sunset I saw over heidelberg since I'm trying to shoot this scene! Last week I was at the same place and well there was a sunset but the WOW was missing. Yesterday evening my jaw was hanging open for more than one hour and I couldn't stop taking pictures. Here's the last one. It was just awesome, the colors changing and changing and finally I had the perfect harmony between the cities red rooftops and the sky.
You might not see it but it's a panorama from 3 shots, bracketing 3 exp for each to do a dri and get the dynamic range which was needed here. I was very carefull to compose the scene with every important building having it's place in the frame.
Hope this shot does evoke some similar feelings as I had them when seeing this sky :-)
Details: f/11 | 11mm | 3exp bracketing + DRI -> pano from 3 vertical shots (Nodal Ninja 5L used) Processing: enfuse GUI for DRI , Hugin for Pano stitching
cheers
finally I got my new wide angle lense. Tokina 11-16 . Well have to say it is quite sharp even at the edges. Still have to experiment a bit but I already start to love this lense. Only the cromatic aberation is quite high but in a way you can easily fix in camera raw!
best View On Black
buy at Redbubble
Last weekend I lead my first workshop for Light and Land in the German Black Forest. On Friday I went scouting a bit in pouring rain. The atmosphere here at the Gertelbach was very special that day.
Black forest in spring is more of a green forest. I led my first photography workshop yesterday. 9 hours of photographing waterfalls and streams, 9 hours of pouring rain. But this was perfect for the photos we had in mind, the colors were intense and the streams were at exactly the right level.
Since I was leading the workshop I took only a few photos myself and most of the time I was holding umbrellas ;-) But here I couldn't resist and had to wade out into the creek to get this shot. It was funny, we needed more than two hours to reach the main waterfall of this creek since the stream looked so nice and every few meters waited another photo opportunity.
Have a nice sunday! cheers
A rainy day in the northern Black Forest. The foliage around the Grobbach on the way to the Geroldsau Cascade looked unbelievably green that day.
Altes Schloß,. Baden-Baden,. Baden-Württemberg, Germany
Heiliggeistkirche, Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg, Germany
The evening before I took the Kraichgau photo I photographed this scene in Heidelberg. Beautiful view as usual. I waited just for the lights to go on to snap the last shot.
In total this photo is combined out of 5 exposures I took while my camera was mounted on the tripod. This was needed to get good detail and even light in the whole scene.
Wanna see how I put those exposures together, then watch my exposure blending timelapse, which I recorded for this shot.
First time I met up with another flickr photographer -> www.flickr.com/photos/andywon/ If you don't know him check out his photostream, lot of great landscape photos and many waterfalls. As I went to the black forest for the first time more than one year ago I was browsing his photostream for possible places to go;-) so it was nice to finally meet up with him.
We went to the Gertelbach cascades which offer plenty of little falls but are not so easy to photograph. Here we were quite lucky with the late afternoon light in the background. It gave a nice reflection in the pool below this little waterfall and with my daylight whitebalance the waterfall had a nice blue cast to it.
As usual I did dri here and some manual blending which I hope is not so obvious.. I tried to keep things natural while increasing the blue in the water a bit.. I just need color contrasts ;-)
cheers
next photoshop tip sharpening:
Well I'm going on without any logical sequence, just what comes to mind.. So the next tip is about the last sharpening you apply to your pictures, right after you scaled them to your desired output size! If you make a smartobject of your layers prior to scaling and sharpening it will be easy to later change the size for web e.g. and also adjust the sharpening radius. That's an important part of my workflow... using smartobjects lets you apply filters nondestructively and you always keep complete control. So here are in fact more than one ps tip.. Try the selective sharpening tool. this is quite superior to the unsharp mask since you can fade the effect in the highlights and shadows. For web try a radius around 0.3 or 0.4 and a sharpening of 120-160.. this way it looks crisp on the screen without to many white edges. For print you need something between 0.8 and 1.5 or even more depending on the size of the print.. there are tools to calculate the optimal size and always remember if it hurts your eye on the screen it might just be right for print.. you need to do some testing there.
And one final tip.. You might want to use a mask to keep the sharpening to the edges and leave planes out.. Go to your channels pallete and CTRL-click on the rgb-layer. Then create a new channel which you could name sharpen-mask and fill the selection with white -> you get a luminance channel for your image. Now use "filter->stylize->find edges" to get the edges of your image.. then use gaussian blur around 2.0 (do some tests) and later tonal adjustment to increase the contrast between the edges and the white around.. You now have an edge-mask which you can use on your sharpening in the smartobject.... and thats another nice thing about the smartobject.. filters you apply there come with a mask :-)
PS: if you have questions feel free to ask . Or if it's bullshit I'm talking here feel free to correct. I'm always eager to learn!
Taken last spring in the northern black forest at one of my favourite cascades. It was a cloudy and rainy day which was perfect for waterfall photography. A polarizer helped to bring out the wonderful colors. In post I worked on contrast, details and just a bit on the colors, in the end I needed to reduce the saturation a bit since the incresed contrast also led to more intense colors.
I have a before and after comparison on my g+ profile if you're interested.
cheers
View on Schlangenweg, Philosophers' Way, Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg, Germany
Took this photo two days ago right after sundown when the lights on the bridge were just switched on. I waited for an hour doing some other shots because I wanted the reflections of the bridge lamps.
... when nearly everything fits.
When I was driving to Heidelberg yesterday evening I noticed a nice tree some 100 meters to the left of the autobahn, standing lonely on a hill. I saw it just a few seconds and thought this would be a nice tree to photograph in the morning.
Since I'm always in search for nice settings I imediatly looked through google maps to find this tree when I arrived in Heidelberg 30 minutes later. Seems I got a quite good orientation because the tree I looked up in google maps yesterday and went to early this morning was exactly the one I saw from the highway.
But what you see above is not this mentioned tree. On the way there I spotet an even better piece of landscape. In the distance the fog was slowly rising off the ground, there was hoarfrost on the grass in the foreground and the sun just started lighting the scene. I shot this facing away from the sun since I liked the way it was warming up the tree.
Ok so what about the other tree I initially went to photograph. Turned out this tree needs some time till it's ripe to be photographed right. I did some shots and will maybe post some later but there was a field surrounding the tree which was quite barren and brown and wasn't what I had in mind for the shot. So I will wait, give whatever will grow on this field some time and come back there to a later time. (in a perfect world it will be a field of sunflowers eventually but I think here I'm demanding to much ;-) )
much better View On Black
Panorama View of Heidelberg Schloss, Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg, Germany
Theater Baden-Baden,. Baden-Württemberg, Germany
Explore Feb 15, 2017 #163
Explore May'2020
A beautiful sunset in Heidelberg photographed in October when the weather was still nice ;-)
When I look out of the window now I don't like what I see. Hopefully winter arrives with some snow soon so I have some now subjects to shoot.
For now I'm browsing through some shots I have taken this year and process them. This one was shot using a lee 0.6 soft and hard GND and I also did several exposures.
I blended those to get better detail throughout the image. For those interested here's a video describing the technique I use: landscapephotographymagazine.com/2011/blending-multiple-e...
I know I already posted this but it never hurts to post again ;-)
have a nice evening or day, depending where you're located.
cheers
A beautiful evening in Heidelberg. Here I captured both sunset and twilight in one photo by using time blending. So I actually took a photo just before the sun dipped behind the hills in the background and then another photos around 40 minutes later with the city and the castle lit up.
Both were combined in photosshop, as you can see in my latest Youtube Tutorial.
View of old town from Hortus Palatinus, Heidelberg Schloss, Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg, Germany
Taken during a photo trip to the Gertelbach with www.flickr.com/photos/andywon/ This was still on our way up and I couldn't resist getting my feet wet :-) I loved the snaking water and tried to capture it that way. By using the polarizer the colors became quite intense and this looks somehow like a jungle scene, but it's the german black forest. Although it was during midday and the sun was out this part of the cascade gets nearly no light and without any nd filters 10sec was needed. I liked the effect here.. For such small waterfalls short exposures just don't work for me..
Hope you like it, please check out Andy's photostream, there are many great landscapes to find and he has also already posted one shot from our trip.
todays photoshop tip is more of a link to a couple of great tutorials which I heavily employd in postprocessing this shot. You will not see much difference to my usual style here but the techniques employed are more of a leap in preserving quality during postproc. A big print will show the benefit for sure! So what about the tutorials. One of my flickr contacts ( www.flickr.com/photos/24562498@N03/ ) just recently pointed me to the homapage of Tony Kuyper -> www.goodlight.us/writing/tutorials.html . He has a bunch of tutorials describing luminance masking and saturation masking there and those are simply great. I was using a lot of mask painting in my work already and also employed the basic luminance mask but what tony describes goes farther. It will help you target specific tonal regions in your image while preserving the tonal values in other regions and he also describes how to keep or work the contrast while employing such masks. That's very important and if you are interested I suggest you read his descriptions.
cheers
I recently spent a wonderful day hiking in the black forest. It was cloudy, raining from time to time - perfect conditions for waterfall photography. The cascade in the photo is near Baden Baden in the northern black forest. I had to wade through knee deep water to get a good perspective on the waterfall. The cold water felt very refreshing and I needed it. I had been up since 3 am to get a sunrise in Kraichgau before I went on to the black forest.
Tech: Hoya HD polarizer + Lee 0.9 ND
cheers
Explore Feb 26, 2017 #138
Trinkhalle,. Baden-Baden,. Baden-Württemberg, Germany
Thanks to all Phoide contributors to Regierungsbezirk Karlsruhe!
Most notably Michele Naro, Michael, Andrey Sulitskiy and Wallace.